This paper provides a survey on recent developments in the European banking industry. Traditional banking activities have contracted in relative terms, but banks remain the predomination players in the euro area financial system. Economic and monetary integration in the EU has strongly...

This paper studies the impact of explicit deposit insurance on market discipline in a framework that resembles a natural experiment. We improve upon previous studies by exploiting a unique combination of country-specific circumstances, design features, and data availability that allows us to...

An empirical investigation of the relationship between market share or concentration and return on equity or assets provides evidence for the existence of a profit-structure relationship in the European banking sector. Testing several market-power and efficient-structure theories reveals that...

This paper investigates the ability of the adaptive learning approach to replicate the expectations of professional forecasters. For a range of macroeconomic and financial variables, we compare constant and decreasing gain learning models to simple, yet powerful benchmark models. We find that...

Administrative and investment costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds. These costs are important because they reduce the rate of return on the investments of pension funds and consequently raise the cost of retirement security. This paper examines the impact of...

In the empirical literature, not much support is found for the uncovered interest parity. Especially with free floating exchange rates, the forward rate is a biased predictor of the future exchange rate. This phenomenon can both be explained by an absence of rational expectations or by risk...

At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many soccer matches were played during stock market trading hours, providing us with a natural experiment to analyze fluctuations in investor attention. Using minute-by-minute trading data for fifteen international stock exchanges, we present three key...

Using an event study approach, we examine the impact of news about Greece and news about a Greek bailout on bank stock prices in 2010 using data for 48 banks included in the European stress tests. We identify the twenty days with extreme returns on Greek sovereign bonds and categorize the news...

This paper analyzes mean reversion in international stock markets during the period 1900-2008, using annual data. Our panel of stock indexes in seventeen developed countries, covering a time span of more than a century, allows us to analyze in detail the dynamics of the mean-reversion process....

The purpose of this Research Memorandum is to assess whether concepts from psychological theory may be useful in explaining herding and crises in financial markets. The conclusion is that the theory of cognitive dissonance, which assumes that the human brain seeks and processes information in a...